Chapter Three Art and Identity: a Specific Reading of the Visual Arts Practices of Assam from 1970 Onwards

K a n d a l i | 86 CHAPTER THREE ART AND IDENTITY: A SPECIFIC READING OF THE VISUAL ARTS PRACTICES OF ASSAM FROM 1970 ONWARDS I IDENTITY: MODERN/POSTMODERN The “ethereal night-lamp” of classicist Basho disappears and the modernist moon emerging as the Sukantosque “Scorched bread” transforms into a postmodernist rectum (“asshole of the sky”- Milan Kundera). “Grand narratives” crumble in deconstructions; hierarchies of space/systems/categories are revised, the unified whole of Hegelian Absolute disseminates into a spectacle of plurality, a set of overlapping truth functionalities. The contemporary is indeed a vast theatre of contradictions and ironies. The political and economical regime offers globalisation, trans-national capitalism, and aspires for a uniformity of the lived qualitative experience. The cultural and social paradigms speak of multiculturalism and differentiations. This normative process of paradigmatic mutation in and through time encompasses the contemporary art discourses also, with the emergence of new categories in art (gender-subaltern-environmental, etc.) proliferation of new images/materials (material as metaphor) in the artistic practice, and translation of the cultural and artistic context/ parameters defined as national / modern into post colonial/post-modern. Of course, as to whether the post- modern is indeed a radically new disjuncture from modern is a contested issue. When the high modernist cultural pretensions – the autonomy of art/artistic freedom as pure form of creative impetus, the myth of auratic “artistic persona”, the claims of ‘originality’ and ‘uniqueness’ – are dismantled in this age of consumerism and mass production/reproduction of images, the binary division of art and life, culture and commerce get coalesced. The subsequent ‘aesthetization’ of life and commercialisation of culture creates the “aesthetic hallucination of reality” (Jean Baudrillard “The Hyper-realism of Simulations” p.1050), life becomes artifice – manufactured rather than natural, everyday life becomes a forest of signs and images (as the essential language of consumerism itself), experience becomes simulacra. And as the impossible modernist drive for the absolute self knowledge and self identity fails with the resultant failure to grasp, capture K a n d a l i | 87 and order ‘reality’ in its absolute sense – in this very disjunction between the project and its claim modernity shifts towards the hyperreal. In the explosion of communication technology, representation and reproduction has become increasingly ‘autonomous’ and ‘realistic’ generating a sense of self-contained hyperreal world. From this perspective, if the simulacra and “hyperreal” is considered to form the core of substantive theory of post-modern (if there had been any) the post-modern looks primarily like a generalisation and intensification of the experience of modernity itself. Our present day internet culture, the heir to the universalising imperative of the modern project, the enhancer of the ideal of push-button democracy simultaneously also remind us of the life-state that escape from the complexities and limitations of the locale and the contextual, when reality becomes virtual, and freedom becomes freedom from the constraints of real situation and real environments and a world which unfolds this spectacle of betwixt and between – reality/simulacra, modern/post modern. The backdrop of such a vast theatre of unfolding contradictions and overlapping currents, crosscurrents and undercurrents in the contemporary world (International/National) have to be kept in mind while considering/reconsidering the dynamics of Identity and art reflexivity in the post-colonial period in Assam. Identity – be it racial, religious, gender or cultural is evolved as we could gather in our discussion in the first chapter, rather than inherent unlike as suggested by the ontological concept of identity. Identity seeks manifestations in definite name, language, ritual customs, heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, social and political milieu, behaviour and life pattern, landscape and the overall environment. This necessarily has to be understood as a result of variable positions or as an unstable notion formed/deformed through dynamic confrontations that simultaneously take place in different settings. Its dynamism is reflected in its constant assimilations in the psycho-social identities both in the subjective and collective level where the process of socialization is a crucial factor. Considering the constantly evolved nature of the notion, conceptualized in a specific historical context of every society, community or group, it has to be understood in relation to the interests of the hegemonic forces existing in a particular historic space-time. In the Indian context, as we have already discussed so far the dynamics of identity formation took a definite departure in the counter discourse against colonization. Here the K a n d a l i | 88 dynamics of culture has to be critically scrutinized within the intermingled paradigm of nationalistic ideology and the politics of nation-state formation. To build the monolithic structure of Indian nation-state and likewise the national cultural mainstream, a strategy of homogenization has been adopted. As observed by Geeta Kapur: Once Independence has been gained, nationalism itself poses ontological questions – what is at stake in being Indian? And though the question may be easily devolved into rhetoric, there is a burden of it that rests on a particularly fraught class of individuals: namely, the urban middle class intelligentsia, including artists . when nationalism and unrealised socialism no longer suffice, the middle class intelligentsia must cope with further states of social entropy – in a way that other section do not – predicted, as it is, on a consciousness of self and identity within the nation state. This is the sort of burden, perhaps unreal and pretentious, that Rabindranath Tagore envisaged for the individual intellectual and artist in India. The responsibility to evolve his or her own subjectivity into an exemplary selfhood that indirectly but surely fulfils the demands of an exemplary nationhood. This burden assumes by proxy the ideal of a collective identity that may, moreover, come to resemble a form of socialism, as Nehru hoped. Certainly the left constituency of the intelligentsia can envisage totalities of another, more egalitarian, order. The imagination turns these expectations to allegorical account: all Third World narratives are national allegories, says Fredric Jameson.” (“Contemporary Cultural Practice; some polemical categories”, p.20-21) Taking a stock of the subsequent scenario, in post colonial third world countries like India, Geeta Kapur further observes that there as capitalism and socialism are contested and ideological battles fought, deeply vexed identities in terms of class, language, race, gender, culture etc. are generated. At this juncture the politicization of cultural identities takes a new transformative form. The dialectics of political identity incorporates the cultural paradigm thereby raising a cacophony of multiple voices proclaiming significance of localisms, of otherness of unique identities. Within the paradigm of international art discourse, the multiple voice of others rising in volume were but the resultant of a world system re-inscribing the old binary division of tribalism versus universalism, nationalism vs. imperialism, first vs. third world. Most subtle is the way in which the constant re-contextualising between local and global perspective lures subsidiary players as intricate parts in the balancing of power, in the larger strategy to regulate regional cultures and politics. The inherent hierarchization often results in a proliferation of relatively powerless subcultures, which are received less as equal partners than as splinters groups of “thems”. The K a n d a l i | 89 American art critic, Lucy. R. Lippard in her book Mixed Blessing outlines a pattern of cultural domination in the United States by a homogenized Euro-American society, and the consequent marginalizing of ‘mixed race’ group comprising African, Native American, Latin American and Asian natives. Lippard states: The Contemporary art world, a somewhat rebellious satellite of the dominant culture, is better equipped to swallow cross-cultural influence than to savour them . .. Ethnocentrism in arts is balanced on a notion of Quality that “transcends boundaries” - and is identifiable by those in power. According to this lofty view, racism has nothing to do with art, qualities will prevail, so called minorities just haven’t got it yet . (Mixed Blessings p.7) It is at the advent of post modernist thinking, when the hegemony and the cultural pretensions of high modernism got dismantled, the monolithic structure of Euro-centric internationalism has been countered, the artists from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Caribbean struggled to place themselves at the cultural “mainstream” invoking their “otherness” racially and culturally. The famous art exhibition “The Other Story” held in Britain in 1989-90 was one such seminal attempt. In fact, with the renewed interest in representation by the pop artists, photorealists or the superrealists in the 1960s and 1970s, a quarter of artists once again began to cognize the persuasive powers of art and started investigating more insistently the dynamics of power and privilege, especially in relation to issue of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. The

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